Prefigurative Politics between Ethical Practice and Absent Promise
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717722363 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717722363
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(2) 521 –537
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717722363
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Prefigurative Politics between
Ethical Practice and Absent
Promise
Uri Gordon
Abstract
‘Prefigurative politics’ has become a popular term for social movements’ ethos of unity between
means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles
two components: (a) an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist
tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives and (b) prefiguration
as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates
backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised resurfacings
in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck’s ‘process of reassurance’ in a
pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal
framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised
the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of
anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts
from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by
that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of
means-ends unity in terms of Bloch’s ‘concrete utopia’, and associating it with ‘anxious’ and
‘catastrophic’ forms of hope.
Keywords
prefigurative politics, temporal framing, anarchism, Marxism, utopia
Accepted: 22 June 2017
Introduction
EIMAΣTE EIKONA AΠO TO MEΛΛON
(We are an image from the future)
Graffiti, 2008 Greek riots.
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Corresponding author:
Uri Gordon, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7
2RD, UK.
Email: uri.gordon@nottingham.ac.uk
722363PSX0010.1177/0032321717722363Political StudiesGordon
research-article2017
Article
522 Political Studies 66(2)
‘Prefigurative politics’ is by now a familiar term for the ethos of unity between means and
ends distinguishing contemporary social movements. Yet the temporal framings awak-
ened by this concept continue to lurk in the peripheral vision of activists and scholars
alike. Concepts travel accidental paths. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are obvious examples of how
pure contingency has shaped our political vocabulary. A concept often becomes institu-
tionalised, not because of its intrinsic richness or explanatory power, but only because of
its emergence or appropriation in a certain context and at a certain time, and the ensuing
irreversible process of dissemination and repetition across writers. This is also the case
with prefigurative politics. Yet, despite having reached social movements through a bro-
ken line of transmission, this composite concept’s temporal resonance remains literally
preserved in its prefix, raising troubling questions for those who employ the term.
Much of the empirically driven work on prefigurative politics suffices with received
definitions (Baker, 2016; Howard and Pratt-Boyden, 2013; McCowan, 2010; Mason,
2014), or uses the concept without much explanation at all (Sancho, 2014; Young and
Schwartz, 2012). Authors who do problematise the term have, to date, abstracted from its
temporal implications, asking instead, for example, what part of social movement activity
it is supposed to describe (‘an action, practice, movement, moment or development’ (Van
De Sande, 2013: 23)); whether it may coexist with reformist agendas (Siltanen et al.,
2015); or how it is differently expressed in micro- and macro-political contexts (Yates,
2015); or focusing on its feminist, queer and spatial dimensions (Evans, 2009; Ince, 2012;
Springer, 2014; Wilkinson, 2010). Scholarship on temporalities in social movements, for
its part, has considered cycles of contention (McAdam and Sewell, 2001), the ‘liminoid’
rhythms of confrontational protest (Krøijer, 2010) and ‘undomesticated’ temporalities
(Szerszynski, 2002), as well as 28 chapters (in Lawrence and Churn, 2012) on memory
and modernity, capital and utopia, Negri and Deleuze – but not temporal prefiguration.
The lacuna is serious, since prefigurative terminology burdens the ethos of means-
ends unity with a misleading temporal framing. In popular usage, the term unproblemati-
cally entangles two different notions of ends: as expressions of intrinsic value (‘an end in
itself’) and as desired future situations (‘an end result’). While the former may be imme-
diately achievable (e.g. though anti-hierarchical organising), the latter’s intelligibility
depends on a temporal framing that connects past, present and future. This article draws
attention to prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing central to Christian theology,
which has also played a key role in generating reassurance for religious and political
movements. It juxtaposes this to the generative temporal framings accompanying the
defence of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition, which remains crucial to ‘path-
dependency’ arguments against hierarchical organisation. My central argument is that
today, misleading prefigurative terminology may work to undermine a generative dispo-
sition towards the future, deferring the inconvenient confrontation with both the absent
promise of straightforward revolutionary transformation, and the prospects of long-term
and uneven ecosystem and industrial collapse.
This article is not, therefore, a concept-history in the classical sense. Following Jane
Guyer’s (2007: 410) influential discussion of temporal framings as an arena in which
individuals and groups seek intelligibility, I attempt to ‘focus on the still-lingering and
newly emergent entailments and dissonances that escape their terms of reference’ in the
concept of prefigurative politics. In foregrounding past and present temporal imaginaries,
and investigating their relationship with ethical revolutionary practice, this article’s con-
tribution is located at the intersection of ethnology, conceptual history and tendentious
political theory.
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